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Marc Unger isn’t shy about mixing his religious beliefs with his three-decade-long love of martial arts.

Every lesson in the Baptist minister’s Exeter karate studio starts and ends with a prayer.

“First and foremost I teach karate — but what my students begin to realize is that it’s about much more than that,” Unger said. “I talk to them about drugs, alcohol and abstinence. It may not be politically correct. But, then, I’ve never been very politically correct.”

He’s also never been one to follow the crowd.

The New York-born Unger was raised in a Russian, secular Jewish household and had music on his mind when he graduated from high school.

“I didn’t see college in my profile,” he said.

Instead, there was the job as a lifeguard at Coney Island and paying gigs as a drummer with local blues and jazz bands.

The karate classes started about 10 years out of high school, an outgrowth of his tough upbringing near the projects in the Bronx. He wasn’t much of a fighter in his youth but the physicality of the sport attracted him.

“There were definitely times when I would’ve wanted to use it,” he said.

It didn’t start out well. After a few rough years and a lot of lost sparring matches, Unger was frustrated. He wasn’t getting the attention he needed to progress and the instructors never seemed to have the right answers.

Then one day in 1978, the referee in his latest, losing bout had some advice for him — although it was a little tough to take.

“He told me ‘Man, you too nice’ and then he told me I didn’t know how to move,” he said.

Unger quickly realized that the referee, 10th-degree black belt Sam Price, was the instructor he should’ve been working with all of this time.

He dropped everything and started working with Price studying the Go Ju Ryu system of karate at Price’s Kansas studio. Over the years he started working as a business manager for the karate master and then moved on to teaching. He became the 10th person in 22 years to earn his black belt from Price.

Then, in 1982, Unger found himself at a crossroads, despondent over his life — and his relationships with women — with nowhere to turn.

“I realized that there were things that I’d done wrong and I found myself praying,” he said. “Then I just picked up my feet and started moving one step at a time.”

The journey would take him to Dallas Bible College and a new career in the ministry. Six years later, now a married father, he would make his way out to the Central
Valley.

It took several years for him to find the right church, and the right congregation, for his message. He worked at skilled jobs to make ends meet.

“I drove a cement mixer — I took whatever came my way,” he said.

Eventually he found his niche, starting a small Southern Baptist church in Exeter.

He also started his own studio in town in 1990, teaching the Go Ju Ryu system.

Since then the studio has become a staple in the small South Valley town, with a case full of trophies won by Unger’s students and his children, some of whom went on to become accomplished martial artists in their own right.

The ministry and the karate studio have always gone hand-in-hand.

“When we do our karate our faith comes through,” he said.

The family also turned to their faith in a time of tragedy. In 2004, Unger’s 19-year-old son Daniel, a karate instructor and a licensed minister himself, was killed in a mortar attack while serving with the National Guard in Iraq. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and his story became the subject of the film “A Hero’s Love” by Family First Films. Unger dusted off his music production skills and wrote and produced a companion CD “I’ll be waiting for you in heaven” dedicated to his son.

Unger also turned his boundless energies into the military chaplaincy, and works as a Captain in the California State Military Reserve helping 1,200-1,400 ex GIs make the transition stateside to this day.

“They recruited me to be the chaplain for Daniel’s battalion,” he said. “It was quite an honor.”

Today, Unger is on the move again. When the congregation got too small to keep the doors of his Exeter church open, he started applying for other ministry jobs around the Valley. He was offered a job two hours to the north in Oakhurst — but he has no plans to give up his work at the karate studio.

His son David, a fifth-degree black belt and a master instructor, will help him make the transition. Unger is quick to point out the 25-year-old David has been in karate for 20 years.

The prayers at the beginning and end of each lesson will also stay.

“It’s a mirror of our faith,” he said. “We are still, very definitely, a Christian organization.”

Many students experience foreign culture through the well-highlighted pages of a history book, studying aboard or an 8 a.m. anthropology lecture.

But in Skher Brown’s Brazilian martial arts class, students cartwheel, handstand and chant their way toward a better understanding of culture in an art form called Capoeira Angola.

“Capoeira Angola is an African-Brazilian martial art that was developed as a form of cultural resistance,” Skher Brown, an adjunct professor in the dance department, said. “I am known as Treinel Skher to my students.  Treinel is a title in my martial art that basically means professor of capoeira.”

Junior Kristen McCoy said she wasn’t sure what she was getting into when she signed up for the class with a group of friends.

“I thought it was just an easy A dance class,” McCoy said. “Day one that was quickly corrected.  The first day of class felt like an intense work out, but we were learning the basic moves of Capoeira.”

McCoy said her expectation of class changed once she understood the culture better.

“There was a brief discussion after class where our treinel told us more about the class and its significance,” she said. “I learned that it was way more than a dance, it was about music, martial arts, community, conversation, relationships and life lessons.”

The enslaved Africans of Brazil merged the art forms of dance, fight and music into a unique expression of the human spirit, according to Brown.

“When two practitioners perform the movements with one another, it is at times difficult to tell whether it is a dance, a fight or some sort of game,” he said.

Information technology major Madeline Tejera said her interest with the martial art started after she saw her treinel in two performances.

“I fell in love with the movement and how it’s martial arts that is so friendly, passive and it just looks like fun,” she said. “It isn’t about beating your opponent, but instead just playing a game.”

McCoy said that she appreciates the atmosphere of equality among her classmates.

“We are playing with one another through call and response, attack and escape,” she said.  “The martial art does not run on a belt system. We are all equal, all capoeiristas, all studying the same thing and all growing together.”

Junior Lucas Oliveira said he has tried every martial art from Brazil, from jiu jitsu to basic self defense, but has never experienced anything quite like capoeira.

“Capoeira is like a conversation,” Oliveira said. “When we attend this class, we’re learning more then just a fighting style. We learn a language. Through it, we as young capoeiristas are able to interact and communicate in away that is unique to capoeira and something that I have not experienced in any other style that I’ve trained.”’

Brown said that the art form has roots in the transatlantic slave trade, when the Portuguese shipped Central Africans to Brazil.

“These enslaved Africans and their African-Brazilian descendents went on to synthesize the new martial art form of capoeira from the old traditional practices that they brought with them from Africa,” he said.

The art form went through a period of repression, according to Brown, but today it is practiced on almost every continent.

“This African-Brazilian martial art is unique in that it uses dance to camouflage aggression and disarm its opponent to gain the upper hand,” he said.  “Capoeira Angola is very playful.  Opponents do not spare, they ‘play’ capoeira.”

Brown said that capoeira is physically and musically demanding.

“It also contains cartwheels, handstands, flips and other acrobatic movements,” he said.  “All practitioners learn to sing fight-chants and play spirited music on percussion instruments.”

This special topics course was offered to all majors during Spring 2012 and might return if there is continued interest, according to Brown.

“Dr. Lea Ramsdell in the foreign languages department was instrumental in getting the course in the curriculum,” he said.

Brown said he focuses on giving students the experience of learning a traditional art form through a non-western teaching method.

“I believe that capoeira changes lives for the better and I believe that the students of Towson will appreciate its value,” Brown said.

Yoko Okamoto did not take up aikido until she was 22, but she has risen to be a 6th dan master and one of the most respected martial arts instructors in Japan.

She established her own dojo (martial arts school) three years ago, converting an old tapestry factory into a place to teach her students. Some of them are foreigners who come to Kyoto especially to study aikido for months at a time.

Before returning to Japan to build what she describes as a community of aikido, Ms Okamoto lived in Portland, Oregon for 14 years.

The job involves early starts. She gets up at 5am and likes to begin by sitting and meditating before leading several classes a day. Sunday is her day off.

As a female instructor Yoko Okamoto is unusual, but she says she does not think about it much. She does not differentiate between her male and female students; she says each individual has their own strengths and weaknesses.

She has two grown up sons and lives with her husband in a newly built house 10 minutes’ walk from work. He practices aikido too – they met at a dojo in Tokyo.